


Pale Princess of a Palace Cracked

by biggrstaffbunch



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Shades of incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 21:32:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biggrstaffbunch/pseuds/biggrstaffbunch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Pevensie children try to adjust, but life rarely goes how one would expect, and things never happen the same way twice. Lucy through the years, until the very end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pale Princess of a Palace Cracked

 

_Six years left._

Life after Narnia goes a bit differently than Lucy Pevensie thought it might.

 _Expect the unexpected,_ Mr. Tumnus once said, but it was a thousands of years before and worlds away, and in the end, Lucy isn't quite certain that _normal_ is the sort of unexpected her old friend really meant.

Lucy has always been rather terrible at normal.

 

 

 

|Edmund.|

There is still a war going on, all three times Lucy spills back into Great Britain, fresh from a sprawling land of fantasy and possibility and wonder beyond the telling of it. There is still a war going on, and though he is just a boy and this is a home he has long forgotten how to defend, Lucy wonders if Edmund misses the weight of a weapon on his hip.

She swings her legs from her perch atop his bed, and she asks, "Edmund, do you ever wish you could fight again?"

Edmund casts her a withering glare; sometimes, she knows how to poke at the worst spots of him, like a needle into an inflamed wound. "Lu," he says, "I am _twelve._ "

"Oh shut it," she says serenely, and lies down next to him, her arm fitting snugly across his chest. His heart beats steadily against her hand. "I am only ten, and I do miss my dagger." She closes her eyes and smiles slightly when Edmund's hand moves hesitantly through her hair, as if mimicking movements he only vaguely remembers. "When I was Queen, you wove ribbons through my crown. You were an excellent handmaiden, Ed. Once."

He growls as she giggles, and she kicks her small feet against his vulnerable shins. They squirm and they wrestle and she almost does not hear when he whispers, heartbreakingly sincere, "You will always be Queen, Lucy, and I shall always be King."

As the afternoon sun wanes and she nestles deeper into his warm sheets, Lucy can hear Edmund move softly across the wooden floor, an intricate sequence of ducking and weaving and jumping, and she knows he is testing his body to see if it remembers as well as his mind.

 

 

 

_1943._

Bit by bit, after Eustace and Caspian and the journey across the sea to the end of the world, Lucy comes to realize that she is in England now, and roaming lions are not exactly the most common of happenstances. She tries not to search the shadows for things that are not there.

Names have power, after all ( _Archenland, Aravis, Reepicheep, Caspian, all that she cannot forget_ ) and if she isn't to call Aslan by the name she has always known, than perhaps the point is that she does not know him any longer.

And anyway, her old friend and saviour escapes her sight in ways he never did, before. Always in that year before she and Edmund went back, Lucy caught the lightning swish of his tail. Now though, any such reminders get lost amidst the falling leaves. Seasons turn and the distant crash of thunder soon swallows the memory of his roar. The brilliance of his teeth is dimmed by the endless grey of relentless rain. Spring comes and the sun blots out the shape of his silhouette. The summer breeze carries with it not the whisper of his bravery and goodness, but a warning of coming autumn.

A year passes. Eventually, she learns to stop looking altogether.

(Her eyes still trip along wardrobes and lamp-posts for a second too long, but no one would fault her that, she thinks.)

Unfortunately, she does not learn to stop hoping.

 

 

 

|Susan.|

Once when Lucy is eleven, in an eerily prescient vision of years to come, Susan walks breezily into their room with a fixed smile upon her face and a skirt swirling above her legs in a not-entirely-decent sort of manner.

"Another letter in the post for you and Edmund, Lu," Susan says, and her tone is so overly-kind that Lucy hates her and forgives her in an instant. She knows that Susan, practical and sentimental in equal doses, is not trying to erase the past; rather, she's only trying to explain it in ways that will allow her to live with the present and the future.

"Who's written to us this time?" Lucy asks, though the unnatural stillness at the corner of Susan's lips tells her the answer better than actual words. Lucy's fingers used to know the curves of Susan's lips quite well, but time has moved backwards and the faithful lines of laughter are gone from their usual places. She misses them acutely, but never says a word.

"Cousin Eustace again," Susan answers, and even if her voice is vague, there is a sheen of yearning over her eyes, like finely-spun glass. "I do wonder where his imagination comes from all of a sudden!"

"Oh, here and there, I imagine," Lucy responds, her voice just as vague. There are tales she could tell, but Susan doesn't seem all too keen on hearing them.

After, though, when she's in the garden reading the letter with Edmund and Peter listening along, Lucy sees Susan at the window, a shadow behind the curtains. Once, with a girlish abandon long lost to her, Susan trailed kisses along Lucy's collarbones till the freckled skin turned pink. Once, Susan danced with her among the flowers. Once, they both linked hands and counted the spring blossoms and swore with indecorous vehemence that they would always be true.

Now, Lucy does not beckon Susan to come outside and Susan does not join Lucy of her own volition.

This is probably the cruelest thing that either girl will ever do to one another.

Another year passes. The letters stop coming. Susan keeps checking the post.

 

 

 

_1945._

All of twelve now, Lucy finds that anything out of the ordinary in her behaviour is automatically and authoritatively labeled 'adolescence' by those who prove infinitely more infuriating than she.

 _Such is the nature of growing up,_ if one is to believe the gentle wisdom of her parents and her older sister. Oh, how grand they make the slow progression of time--twists and turns and fun to be had, a pathway unforseen, small victories and immense tragedies, and amazement in even the most everyday things. Humanity and an Earth that keeps turning, lessons which one keeps learning!

Lucy tries. Dipping into a pot of rouge, she fills all the colorless lines on the pale heart of her face. Perfume dotted against the vulnerable curve of her neck, and something like soot darkening her lashes, she makes her eyes stand out, large and unblinking. Susan does this too, a nightly ritual before dancing and parties, and sometimes the emptiness in her smile looks as startling as it is on Lucy's lips right now.

She looks at her reflection and asks, what good is beauty when she is doomed to sit on chairs instead of a throne? What good is this city when all she can do is draw castles in the air, her fingers skipping restlessly over the ghostly lines of Cair Paravel?

And though they don't say a word, later when Edmund is wringing out damp washcloths and Peter is wiping her face free of age and adornments, both of them with hands strong and reassuring, both of them with mouths full and trembling with feeling, Lucy can tell that they agree.

She keeps forgetting that they are older. That if anyone can understand the odd feeling of displacement rooting in her bones, the itch crawling up her lungs and through her throat, they can.

It does not make her feel better, but it makes her feel less alone.

 

 

 

|Peter.|

On her thirteenth birthday, she comes to Peter as she usually does. Traditions have meaning in every life she has ever known, and though she is not five, or seven, or even ten anymore, it is comforting to think that she will always be Lu to some people.

Lounging cross-legged before Peter as he sits in a rocking chair and cards his fingers through her hair, Lucy looks up at him through half-opened eyes. He is still so straight-backed and noble, his face shrouded in the muted glow of candle-light as he loosens her tight braids. He cradles her skull carefully, and somewhere in the distant curve of his smile, she sees the man he was and will one day become.

"You're getting quite tall, aren't you?" he muses. His voice is so low it is mostly to himself, but she hears him because she is the heart of him, one-fourth of each contraction that rocks his ribcage. "Growing like a vine."

She mutters a _thanks ever so much, Peter,_ because it seems she will always be a weed among roses, the sister who spent countless years wearing breeches under her skirt, the sister who comes home with a smudged nose and bleeding knees. No fretting over torn seams or smudged lipstick, only birds that don't sing their secrets to her any longer.

Peter places one hand on her shoulder, reaching the other hand to wind around her skinny wrist. He bends and his lips skim her temple, soft against her translucent skin, his breath parting the wispy hair rioting along her hairline. A finger traces the blue veins at the base of her palm.

Fleeting contact, for just one moment. But he wouldn't be Peter if even an instant of his benediction--his understanding--didn't drag a low, almost painful shudder through the trembling depths of her belly.

"We all change perspective some day, Lu," he whispers, and he sounds so sad that she tilts her head back, gives him a quick, impulsive kiss against his throat. He catches her chin, lets his thumbs flicker against the angle of her jaw. "Every year, you can see just a bit deeper, just a bit more. Sometimes, you begin to see through the things that made sense at one time. You begin to see truth."

She regards him for a moment, her legs folded to her chest, his hands hot against her neck. He looks as shattered as she feels, as shaken that he might actually believe this possibility that he has just uttered.

"It could be, Peter," she offers, "That we are all simply looking in the wrong direction."

He does not answer for a long time, but when she finally rises to go to bed, she curtsies primly, and the echo of his laughter is a little less hollow than it has been in ever so many years.

 

 

 

_1947._

There are milestones, of course, the standard rites-of-passage and important events. Birthdays and anniversaries. Christmas and Easter, a holy quiet descending on the church and Lucy's heart beating out of her chest in a scattered recollection of effusive devotion, of pure trust, of belonging somewhere so utterly and completely.

Before Narnia, sitting on the wooden pews amidst bent heads and solemn vows, she was never quite sure what she was supposed to say. Usually it was for something laughably simple but truly honest, such as her family's safety and for her heart to always remain true.

On her sixth Christmas Eve since Narnia, however, she wakes up to find a red stain on her sheets and a sympathetic smile on Susan's face.

"No worries, Lu, it's quite normal. I started right after we got back from--" Susan stops, looks stricken. "I mean, I started when I was fourteen," she corrects. "Just like you."

And so that day as she stands on sacred ground, Lucy--who has changed from girl to woman twice in one lifetime already--asks for something entirely different.

 _Please,_ she pleads, and regardless of the fact that even now, she can only see a golden mane in the cracks and angles of the stained glass windows, she is praying to a nameless, faceless figure, _Please, let me always believe. Please let me always remember._

There is no answer, but Edmund's arm is warm around her shoulder when he finds her later, inexplicably outside and staring up at the snowfall, shivering with cold. Peter joins them, and even Susan is there, blessedly silent as Peter points to each constellation in the curiously clear sky, naming them in an ancient tongue. There was a solarium once, in the towers and turrets of their royal home, and the night she turned twenty, they drank sweet wine and laughingly told stories of the stars.

She will turn twenty again, but burrowing closer to her brothers and listening to her sister try not to cry, Lucy decides that there are things that are still quite impossible to forget.

Some days, this knowledge is comfort. Most days, it is not.

 

 

 

|Edmund and Peter.|

One night, Susan does not come home.

Parents away visiting friends in Cornwall, and Peter finally old enough to take care of the family on his own, Susan decides to flout the rules in a way that's so uncharacteristic it's almost laughable.

Peter waits until half past two before he flings himself off the rocking chair in the sitting room, rips his coat from the rack near the door, and instructs Edmund to lock the door and keep Lucy safe.

"Where has he gone, do you think?" Edmund asks, and gathers Lucy close as she begins to tremble.

"To bring Susan home," Lucy sighs. "I wonder if she will break Peter's heart tonight." She slips her hand under the warmth of Edmund's jumper; her skin is so cold and Ed is always warm.

He makes an indelicate sound against Lucy's hair, and for a wild, careening moment, she forgets all about Susan and the yelling that is sure to ensue when the older Pevensie siblings come home. For a wild, careening moment, all that exists is that noise from the back of Edmund's throat, the way his hand clenches at her shoulder, the gasp of recognition and the quiet swear as he realizes what he's given away.

Lucy is the curious sort, and she can be brave about _some_ things.

She flattens her palm against Edmund's stomach and slides it up, rests it above his heart. The chill of her skin fades as Edmund breathes, an unsteady rise of his chest under her loosely-curled palm. She chances a look up. In the scattered light from the street-lamps outside, he is impossibly beautiful. Silvers and blacks, dark hair and pale skin and a throat that is working over a strained intake of air.

She has always loved beauty. She has always loved Edmund. There is no other reason she needs to raise her face and kiss him, and he meets her halfway, his mouth moving tenderly over hers, hungrily. He looks dazed when they finally part, his lips swollen and his hair more than a bit mussed. But he smiles, a proper Edmund smile that is a hint of a smirk and a hint of such seriousness that Lucy wants to pinch his nose to make him laugh. Instead, she bites her lip and looks to the stairs.

He takes the cue quite well.

They kiss atop the covers, chaste as children but easy as lovers, his arms around her shoulders and her arms around his waist, and Lucy thinks distantly that perhaps this was meant to happen. A decade and change in Narnia without a real thought as to marriage or children or even romance, and now Lucy understands:

It is because her family has always been enough.

The door below slams sometime around half past three, and Lucy can hear indistinct shouting for a split second before thundering footsteps and another slam of a door. Lucy wonders if she should sneak back to her room, if she might soothe Susan by going back or spook Peter by being here, but Edmund's hand at her hip makes her stay.

And anyway, Lucy supposes that Peter, more than Susan, will need she and Edmund tonight.

The door to the room opens slowly, as if there is no will behind the move. For a moment, Peter stands there, his shoulders slumped and his breathing ragged, and it occurs to Lucy that she has not seen her brother so unerringly _human_ in a very long time. It endears him to her, even as it makes her anxious to set him to rights once more.

"Oh," Peter intones, and there is a wealth of meaning in the word. There is nothing out of sorts about their clothing nor their hair, but Lucy knows that if there were ever anyone from who she and Edmund could not hide, it would be Peter.

"Peter--" Edmund begins, but Peter only holds up a hand. He staggers, as if wounded, and Lucy rises from the bed, suddenly worried.

"Did you get into it with some of the boys at the party?" she asks, and cannot keep the disapproval from her voice. "That would only have made Susan more angry, Peter! You can't just--"

"Apparently," Peter interrupts, and closes the door, "I can't do _anything_ where her highness Susan the _gentle_ is concerned." He spits out the word gentle, and this is not the Peter she knows. Lucy reaches out. Peter takes Lucy's hand, but looks at Edmund, his eyes almost unseeing.

He chokes then, stumbles closer and bends to his knees in front of them, a supplicant who was once a king. He lays his head on Lucy's lap, and she runs an uncertain hand over the planes of his back. Edmund is a comforting weight against her shoulder, and Lucy leans into him as he adds his hand to the curve of Peter's spine.

"She's forgotten, Lu." Peter takes a deep breath, raises his head. His eyes are wet, and Lucy sighs against the ache between her ribs. "She's forgotten when all I can do is remember, and for the first time in ages, when I look into her eyes, I can't _see_ myself--"

It is Edmund who cuts Peter off, with a hand to his mouth.

It is Lucy who kisses him.

"She's never coming back with us," Peter whispers when Lucy tilts his chin up, and he sounds so scared.

"Perhaps," Lucy allows, and then she touches her lips to his. "But we are not gone yet."

The dawn streaks pink across the sky some hours later, and still, no one sleeps.

 

 

 

_1949._

On the surface, Lucy is as well-adjusted as the lot of them. She makes friends who gossip about boys and music and the dangerous thrill of pilfered wine. She wears her school uniform and learns about history and science and math and literature. She hugs her mum and dad, and teases her siblings when she sees fit. She no longer stops to chat to a random squirrel, nor does she stroke the trees lining the neighbour's yard. No one speaks of her with worry, not anymore.

But she knows Peter watches her, gaze intent and heart noble, just as surely as she knows that Edmund gets into terrible rows with Susan when she calls Lucy 'a bit too whimsical' for her own good. They are all protecting her, in their own ways. Peter the eternal king, and Edmund of a learned loyalty, and Susan. Susan, the gateway who beckons Lucy into a world of nylons and hairspray and skirts that flounce. Susan, who presses a kiss to each eyelid of Lucy's when the moon is fat and full in the sky, and then slips out to the dance-halls until dawn. Susan who loves them but leaves them, and who feels just as much sorrow as they do for the chasm that continues to divide.

Lucy supposes that they're all of them the same, surface-shiny and inside, full of cracks and faulty parts. A quartet of broken soveriegns, because once a King or Queen of Narnia--

It should worry her that she isn't sure how that sentence ends anymore. Instead, she closes her eyes and tries not to dream.

 

 

 

|Lucy.|

The train is moving so fast that Lucy hardly feels it when it happens. Truth be told, she moves seamlessly from the drowning darkness of sleep into the endless sky above her. There is a scream, and a jarring crash, and then something almost like pain flashing through her. And just underneath it all, there is the melodious crash of seafoam to shore.

With a roar, the hills shake. With a cry of happiness, Lucy lets go.

The water is warm, and she is home.

 

_now._

"We don't have to fight anymore, do we?" Peter asks, and though he looks weary, Edmund only looks hopeful. (He has missed his sword quite a bit, Lucy is sure.)

Aslan bares his teeth, an approximation of a smile. "No," he rumbles, "The time for fighting has long past. These are days of rest, dear ones."

Perhaps Susan was the strongest of all four, to live when they have died. Perhaps she was simply the unluckiest. Or the most practical. Lucy does not know, but she is patient. She strings spring blossoms into a garland, and leaves it on a sun-warmed rock, waiting for the day that Susan will be called home one last time.

 _Things begin when they end,_ another wise adage courtesy of Mr. Tumnus. This time, though, perhaps things are turning out exactly how he meant.

Linking one hand with Peter and one hand with Edmund, and humming softly to herself, Lucy walks ever East.

**Author's Note:**

> Reposted from LiveJournal.


End file.
